Weekly Head Voices #16: Go Go Gadget!

This post is dedicated to my man Helmut in Vienna. Your appreciation is much appreciated!

In this edition, I report on my productivity and activities of the past week, extol the time-saving virtues of iGoogle and conclude with a new WHV feature: The Head Voices Review! Unfortunately, due to a chronic lack of sleep, there will be no backyard philosophical contribution. We hope to be back on track for the next edition.

During week 9 of 2010, the temporal context of the sixteenth edition of the Weekly Head Voices, I spent 2 hours preparing for lectures, 3 hours lecturing and 12 hours in scheduled meetings. I spent a significant amount of time assisting five of our MedVis Ninjas shepherding papers out the door, so now you have to cross your fingers that we get 100% accept rate, else the Ninjas get really angry. Counting up to the weekend, and without any cheating, I completed 22 GTD tasks, again one task more than last week. If this continues, I will eventually attain infinite productivity, so you better watch out, ok?

The main topic of this post is gadgets. I’ll be talking about two kinds of gadgets, so first I’d like to start with a screenshot of my iGoogle:

iGoogle your twitter.

I’ve been aware of iGoogle, and used it as a poor man’s aggregator before getting addicted to Google Reader, but never really appreciated the possibilities. In short, you can add all kinds of web applications, called gadgets, to any number of tabs (each tab is a page), thus mixing and matching for example the social networking websites you use on one single web page. Because I’d recently been wasting far too much time switching between twitter, facebook (everytime someone mentions facebook, I somehow reflexively and compulsively open the site, hence wasting more precious minutes of my life, which at my advanced age is no small matter), gmail and compulsive news checking, I decided to compress my time wasting into a single page visit. So far, it seems to be saving me a number of minutes every day, minutes that I’m saving for later…

Finally, it pleases me greatly to be able to introduce a new feature on the WHV: The Head Voices Review! [As soon as my TPN completely masters Ableton, I’m hoping he’ll make me a nice theme song that I can insert here.] Some of you might know that this blog has a rich history in reviewing gadgets. See for example this post where, after weeks of investigation, I posted an in-depth review of not one, but TWO cheap-skate headphones. To summarise:

Sennheiser PX20: SUCKS.

Philips HP-200: AWESOME.

To kick off this first edition, I’m going to discuss three more computer audio gadgets. First off, the Logitech S3-30 2.1 (that means stereo speakers with sub-woofer to my non-audiophile readers) computer speaker set with built-in amplifier. I’ve used these extensively for five years now (purely for the purposes of reviewing them of course) and have set out my conclusions in the table below:

Logitech S3-30: SUCKS BADLY.

I base my conclusion on the sub-par design of these speakers, especially in terms of the cabling. Below is an artist’s rendition of the cable design for these speakers:

As you can see, it’s as if the engineers had been challenged to see how much cable they could waste in producing these speakers, and as a side-challenge, how they could ensure that any desk carrying these speakers would instantly turn into an unmanageable mess of cables in various states of entanglement. Why why why didn’t they read this really important paper?

I have recently ordered the JBL Duet 200 to replace the S3-30. After at least five more years of extensive testing, I will document its performance in a future Head Voices Review.

On the topic of Logitech, a number of my screencasts up to now have been performed using a Logitech Analog Desktop Microphone with 3.5mm jack plug, purchased especially for that purpose. Now that I’ve also purchased the quite affordable (6 bucks for the whole headset, that means headphone AND microphone!) yet very stylish Sweex HM400 headset, also for recording screencasts, I can present the following comparative review:

Logitech Analog Desktop Microphone with 3.mm jack plug: SUCKS.

Sweex HM400 headset: AWESOME. Wait till you hear my deep baritone narrating the next screencast. I expect that it should sound almost exactly like this:

Err, that’s it for the first edition of the Head Voices Review! I don’t think that you have to worry too much about the next edition arriving anytime soon. Here at HVR headquarters we take our sweet time, as we pride ourselves in jumping to all of the wrong conclusions, all of the time.

Facebook needs attention all the time! There must be a better way to process the flow of err.. let’s call it *stuff* on FB. I just haven’t figured out the Right Way yet. If anyone does, please let me know :). Maybe I should restrict FB usage to weekends and find a way to filter the stuff better.

Nice to read once in a while about how other ppl Get Things Done :) I recently switched from Moleskine to Things for Mac. The only thing I miss (a bit) is the lack of syncing with an online service that I can access on any internet-connected device.

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About

This is my personal blog. You will find posts on science, software, general nerdery, privacy and backyard philosophy. It also hosts the Weekly Head Voices, a weekly (mostly not) personal diary, in which I usually also try to include something entertaining and/or educational.